Why local search is the one channel you can win
A national title company runs one website across every state it operates in. That is efficient, and it
is also the opening. Broad terms go to whoever spends the most. County and city terms go to whoever is
genuinely local and says so clearly — which is you.
The practical consequence is that you should stop competing for "title insurance" and start competing
for the four or five counties where you actually close. Those searches are fewer and worth far more,
because the person typing them has a property in that county right now.
Write county pages that could only have come from you
A county page written by a copywriter reads like a copywriter wrote it. A county page written by
somebody who files there contains things only they would know: the recording fee, whether the seller or
the buyer customarily pays for the owner's policy in that county, how long the recorder is currently
taking, which municipalities inside it charge their own transfer tax.
Write those pages only for counties you genuinely serve. Fifty thin county pages for places you have
never closed in reads as spam to Google and to any Realtor who opens one.
Get the Google Business Profile details exactly right
More local rankings are lost to sloppy profile data than to anything on the website. Your name,
address and phone must be byte-identical everywhere they appear — your site, your profile, your
underwriter's directory, the state land title association listing. "Suite 200" in one place and "Ste 200"
in another is enough to blunt it.
Choose the closest primary category, add your service areas, and post occasionally. A profile that has
not been touched in two years signals a business that might not exist.
Reviews are the local ranking factor you control outright
Ask every Realtor and loan officer at closing, and ask them by name for the escrow officer who did the
work. A review that says "Maria walked our buyer through a payoff problem on a Friday afternoon" outranks
fifty five-star ratings with no words, both for Google and for the next person reading it.
Volume matters less than recency and specificity. Ten detailed reviews from this year beat sixty
generic ones from 2021.
Local links your competitors cannot buy
Your state land title association. The Realtor boards you belong to. The chambers, the charity closings
you sponsor, the CE class you taught. These are unglamorous and almost impossible for a national brand to
replicate at county level, because they require actually being there.